By Katie Halper • @kthalps • 12 years ago

Mad Men Remix: A Queer Love Story

The awesomely talented “Pop Culture Pirate,”  Elisa Kreisinger, has just released her latest work of video remix art, which plays with Mad Men, our expectations, and social norms.  Kreisinger is  a media fellow at the Center For Social Media at American University, a new media and video trainer for the Women’s Media Center, and an “appropriation video artist” whose creations, like the Fran Lebowitz Coming Out Remix and the Sex and the City: QueerCarrie  remixes, have been featured in Salon, After Ellen, and Logo, to name a few.

In a (g-chat) interview, Kreisinger said,

 “When you’re culturally ‘poor’ for representation, both queer and feminist, you have to reuse the things you have access to, whether it be for subtext, your own entertainment or for critique. My hope was that I could turn the mixed feelings I had about the retro-sexual roles of women in mad men into something practical: product that my feminist theory addressed in theory only.”

When speaking about  QueerMen: Don Loves Roger Mad Men Remix,  released last week, Kreisinger explained: “I wanted to tell a story about these two men who once preserved concepts of manhood and masculinity but then found relief and happiness in each other, becoming a threat to the very same patriarchal system on which their power and privilege was based.”

QueerMen: Don Loves Roger Mad Men Remix from popculturepirate on Vimeo.

This morning, Kreisinger released her second Mad Men remix,  Mad Men: Set Me Free, a collaboration with mashup master and DJ Marc Faletti. Kreisinger told me, “by framing the female characters from Mad Men in a series of boxes, we illustrate how the show, and by extension, society, isolates and marginalizes women’s voices within pop culture narratives. As a result, it’s important for women to tell their own stories. For me, making mash ups is the best way to tell these stories.” Faletti said, “We love that feeling when two familiar pieces of pop culture blend to make something entirely new, especially when it’s punctuated by the perfect song. Mad Men: Set Me Free shows us that the remix format — and the joy it creates — isn’t just limited to music. It can create new and interesting stories.”

Make sure you keep up with Elisa Kreisinger’s work. You’ll be happy you did.

 

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Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City’s Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) A director of Living Liberally and co-founder/performer in Laughing Liberally, Katie has performed at Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project, D.C. Comedy Festival, all five Netroots Nations, and The Nation Magazine Cruise, where she made Howard Dean laugh! and has appeared with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her writing and videos have appeared in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation Magazine, Gawker, Nerve, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, Alternet and Katie has been featured in/on NY Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Gawker,Jezebel, MSNBC, Air America, GritTV, the Alan Colmes Show, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once) and the National Review, which called Katie “cute and some what brainy.” Katie co-produced Tim Robbins’s film Embedded, (Venice Film Festival, Sundance Channel); Estela Bravo’s Free to Fly (Havana Film Festival, LA Latino Film Festival); was outreach director for The Take, Naomi Klein/Avi Lewis documentary about Argentine workers (Toronto & Venice Film Festivals, Film Forum); co-directed New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for Museum of the City of NY exhibit, and wrote/directed viral satiric videos including Jews/ Women/ Gays for McCain.

Katie is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and New Yorker.

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